There was some sort of mass panic last night when Google was spewing a warning “this site may harm your computer” on all their search results. People search on Google were shocked and confused as if the search engine itself was hacked.
Connie took a screenshot from her browser of what turned out to be human error from some engineers over at Google:
The incident happened sometime between 6:30 a.m. PST and 7:25 a.m. as Google explains:
What happened? Very simply, human error. Google flags search results with the message “This site may harm your computer” if the site is known to install malicious software in the background or otherwise surreptitiously. We do this to protect our users against visiting sites that could harm their computers. We maintain a list of such sites through both manual and automated methods. We work with a non-profit called StopBadware.org to come up with criteria for maintaining this list, and to provide simple processes for webmasters to remove their site from the list.
We periodically update that list and released one such update to the site this morning. Unfortunately (and here’s the human error), the URL of ‘/’ was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and ‘/’ expands to all URLs. Fortunately, our on-call site reliability team found the problem quickly and reverted the file. Since we push these updates in a staggered and rolling fashion, the errors began appearing between 6:27 a.m. and 6:40 a.m. and began disappearing between 7:10 and 7:25 a.m., so the duration of the problem for any particular user was approximately 40 minutes.
A single character (the “/”) did all that trouble. One can only imagine if it were a single word/command or a line of code?
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